MULTIPLE award winning broadcast journalist and one of Radio Nigeria’s foremost Network Newscasters, Funke Treasure Durodola, shares her unique experience as a traveller child in Western Nigeria of the 1980’s.
In Memories of Grandma, her childhood memoir, she also critically engages with the thinking behind cultural choices from the eyes of a child.
Grandmothers symbolise different things to children. For young Funke, Grandma could never do wrong, Grandma meant travel, variety of traditional meals, entry into the wisdom of the aged, folk tales, songs and an excursion into the strange world of adults, who ‘always have a reason for everything’.
The setting is Western Nigeria of the early 80’s, when most Nigerians maintained vegetable gardens close to their homes, men rode Vespa’s motor cycles for leisure; when Peugeot 404 was the cool car for mid-income families, when seeing a corpse on the street was rare and close to an abomination; when public schools were as good as the private ones. It was the days of Kingsway and Leventis and Odutola stores in Ijebu Ode.
The days without traffic gridlocks, when parents returned home early enough from the office, to be involved in their children’s growth.
According to Treasure, “Memories of Grandma is a collection of stories about my childhood. It’s a childhood memoir. It’s about the world I grew up in and at whose feet I drank the water of knowledge and wisdom. It is set in the Nigeria of the 1980’s. I don’t know about recent times, but back in the days when we resumed from holidays, our teachers made us write a generic kind of essay usually titled, ‘How I spent my last holiday’”.
Continuing she said “Memories of Grandma speaks to the need for a child to familiariase herself with her cultural environment. It is about a child’s search for the reasons things are the way they are in her culture. It is a book about how a network of people and places united to feed the curiousity of a child. It captures food, music, transportation, farming, life in the country side and respect for elders, which is gradually getting lost in today’s global culture. There are more lessons in Memories of Grandma, individuals will have to appropriate those lessons according to their needs. I must also add that adults will find Memories of Grandma fascinating because it will definitely take them to their places of childhood and fill them with nostalgia.
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